June 02, 2005

Email Infrastructure Upgrades

As I mentioned in an earlier post it’s been busy around here at Webmail.us. We’re firing on all cylinders -- hiring, growing the business, and putting a ton of resources into product R&D. But the biggest strategic initiative so far this year is one we haven’t talked much about: infrastructure improvements.

Our CTO-led engineering team has been working feverishly with our infrastructure partner, Rackspace, to deploy our next generation infrastructure platform. We’re taking our current platform and adding dozens of servers in a new configuration to improve the performance, reliability, and scalability of our system. According to Pat, our CEO, this is the biggest financial commitment we’ve ever made (he promises to blog in more detail about this soon).

Timing

The only downside to our infrastructure project has been that our timing turned out to be a couple of weeks off. The result has been less than optimal email system performance for some customers, resulting in email delivery delays during peak hours of the business day (some customers have not been affected by this but for those that have, we want you to know what we are doing behind the scenes). We’re not just working on eliminating issues with short-term fixes; we’re thinking miles down the road as we plan for the future growth of our company and achieving the highest level of email performance possible.

The Work Begins

We started bringing new servers online last week that were targeted at eliminating the bottlenecks you might have experienced at peak hours during the past week. The impact was immediate, but we still have a lot more to do. The entire infrastructure upgrade will be complete later this month and we’re committed to keeping the system’s performance as robust as possible in the meantime.

If you have experienced any type of email delays, I want to apologize on behalf of our company. Our entire senior management team and engineering staff is working together to smooth the transition to the new and improved system. If you have technical questions about the issues or our new infrastructure, drop me an email and I’ll fill you in.